


Out at the Edge

by fmo



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, brief mention of Yancy's death but that has already happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:50:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a less lucky world, the last Jaegers were lost before Stacker Pentecost could form his plan to close the breach. Now the Jaeger Program is officially shut down and Raleigh Becket is still working on the Anti-Kaiju Wall in Alaska, even though he knows that the wall is not enough to stop the kaiju. While Raleigh is working on repairing a section of wall that was destroyed by a kaiju, he meets Mako Mori, a member of a team of scientists who are studying the remains of the battle that broke the wall. </p><p>However, neither Raleigh nor Mako knows about the other's connection to the Jaeger Program . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out at the Edge

Raleigh’s stuck in a loop these days. New section of wall, new shift, snow, sleep, snow, eat, new section of wall. The only thing different here is that a kaiju broke through this section last month; this is rebuilding, not building. He was here last year building it for the first time.

 

It’s not that Raleigh doesn’t feel that sense of dread, the feeling of standing on an edge and looking down into an endless pit.  But he’s been feeling it for so long that it’s just a distant buzz as he straddles a beam in the air and does his part to patch together this chasm in the wall. There’s nothing anyone can do anyway; the Jaeger program was shut down last year, and the last Jaegers are lying in pieces in Oblivion Bay and in shreds on the Pacific floor. A few miles inland from here, in the snow, is where the last Jaeger, Crimson Typhoon, fell.

 

At least Typhoon took its kaiju down with it. In Sydney, they used bombs. There’s no more Sydney now. Now the walls are being built thicker.

 

As sure as Raleigh can see the waves out beyond the crumbling edge of the snow, he knows that one day soon a kaiju will come and nobody will stop it. It’ll just keep going, walking across a continent like a kid walking over a floor scattered with Legos. Even the ones who got to hide way inland won’t be safe, but it’ll be too late then.

 

There are a few scientists here, looking at the hole in the wall where the kaiju smashed through. Raleigh wonders why. It’s obvious that the kaiju got through, right? There’s twisted rebar on the ground. Even through the snow, you can see there’s wounds in the earth where it looks like the Jaeger’s feet were dragged, like it tried to make a stand and couldn’t hang on. There’s cordoned-off pools of Kaiju Blue and dead places where there were kaiju guts.

 

Raleigh can see it all from his vantage point up on top of the wall. But he keeps working. It’s like he’s just going on because his body tells him to. Keep on working, keep getting food to eat and a warm place to sleep until the apocalypse comes and there are no walls any more.

 

On his second night there, when he slides down and trudges into the ration line to get his dinner--he’s not going to call it slop because it’s delicious to him--there’s a news report on the TV on the wall and the scientists are there looking at the television.

 

The report is all about moving inland. It’s just a natural migration, the reporter says. The fish are all tainted anyway. The Jaeger program, let’s be honest, just didn’t work. It wasn’t sustainable. We have to be realistic. We can build a new way of life away from the oceans.

 

Raleigh stands in line, looking at the TV and thinking that he’s never heard anyone be so wrong with so much confidence, and then one of the scientists glances over toward the line of construction workers. She’s wearing a thick woolen coat, and blue tips to her hair are peeking out below her hat, and the scowl of her thick eyebrows says that she’s thinking just what he’s thinking about the crock of shit this person is spouting on TV. And then she sees Raleigh’s face, and a moment of understanding passes between them, wordless. He thinks he nods a little, just slightly, and she smiles, just a bit. Or it might be the other way around.

 

As the line moves forward, Raleigh hears her say to another scientist: “Four years ago, they called the Jaeger pilots heroes.”

 

While he gets his food, Raleigh’s left wondering if she means that _she_ thinks the Jaeger pilots were heroes or not. But when he goes to sit down, he finds the blue-haired scientist sitting at the end of a bench on her own, just eating her stew. So he takes the chance, pauses at the bench across from her and says, “This space taken?”

 

“No, it’s not,” she says. She’s looking at him like she’s examining every inch of him, but there’s still a ghost of the smile he might have seen before. And he thinks he might be looking the same way at her, so it’s okay.

 

“I thought you scientists were fans of the Wall,” Raleigh says.

 

The blue-haired scientist shakes her head. “We were asked to determine how much thicker it needs to be. The problem is that nobody wants to hear the answer to that question.”

 

“Everyone up on the wall could tell them, too,” Raleigh says. “We see the news reports.” Warmer, now, from the soup, he pulls his knitted hat off. His hair probably looks wild underneath, but there’s nothing he can do. He does wish, though, that his beard wasn’t so scruffy right now. More quietly, he says, “Do _you_ think the Jaeger pilots were heroes?”

 

The scientist pauses for a moment, like she’s considering the question, and then says, steadily, “I was a child in Tokyo when it was attacked. So, yes: I know they are.” There’s a steeliness about her that reminds Raleigh of Marshall Pentecost—a man he hasn’t really thought about in years.

 

For a moment, Raleigh has the impulse to tell her that he was a Jaeger pilot once. It’s not an impulse he’s ever had before; after Yancy-and-Raleigh-Becket were gone, he doesn’t want to be recognized as Raleigh Becket any more. As far as he knows, the government thinks he died in the Pacific five years ago.

 

Then she says, “Do you think they are heroes?”

 

Despite himself, he smiles. “I don’t know,” he says. He’s known some asshole Jaeger pilots in his time. He wouldn’t call himself a hero, just someone who happened to find exactly the right place for himself in the world. “I think the Jaeger program was our best hope for staying alive,” he says at last.

 

It looks like this was the right answer, in the scientist’s opinion, but before they can say anything further the shift leader is calling out that lunch break is over, time to get back up there.

 

Raleigh grabs his bowl, shoves a last spoonful in his mouth, and gets up. As he turns to say goodbye or something, the scientist makes a little movement with her hand that could be a wave. So he goes with that: an awkward goodbye wave.

 

When he’s back up on top of the wall, though, he doesn’t even care about how awkward it is or that he never asked the scientist her name. It’s like he can hear Yancy saying in his ear, _acting like an idiot over a girl_ , but that’s not a bad feeling. The apocalypse is right at the world’s doorstep, but, for the first time in a long time, Raleigh really wishes he could get in a Jaeger and stop it.

 

The next day, he actually bothers jostling to the front of the line so he’ll have more time to talk. He’s rewarded by seeing the scientist there again, sitting where they’d been the previous day.

 

A little tentatively, he sits down across from her again; this time, he’s covered in snow from an unrelenting snowfall outside. Apparently that isn’t enough to stop construction. As he takes his hat off and shakes it, the scientist laughs at the snow coating falling off him, and he laughs too.

 

“How long have you been working on the wall?” she asks, right away.

 

“Five years,” he says. “How long have you been helping to build the wall?”

 

“Only a year,” she says. More quietly, she adds, “We’re trying to use our data to convince the PPDC to re-open the Jaeger program.”

 

“With more advanced Jaegers to match the stronger kaiju that are coming out?”

 

“Exactly,” she says. “Starting with more advanced versions of old Jaegers, built on salvageable remains from Oblivion Bay. We have the designs already.”

 

Raleigh imagines picking up the phone to tell Marshall Pentecost he wants to pilot a Jaeger again. To save the world again. Even to pilot Gipsy again—the Jaeger that’s part of him, and part of Yancy too.

 

If he could, he’d choose this woman as his co-pilot—and that’s a strange thought, and a wonderful one. “If I could, I’d pilot a Jaeger with you,” he says, because it’s true.

 

He doesn’t mean it as a pick-up line, but—the look on the scientist’s face is like--well, she liked that. And yeah, if someone said that to him, he'd react the same way. She stands up from the table and takes his hand. And then he doesn't need to Drift with her to know. Like it's no big deal, they take off and head toward the hallway, the bend in the hallway where nobody will see them.

 

And they kiss, first gently and then more deeply, holding on to each other. Raleigh's still all dirty from the welding, but the scientist doesn't seem to care. 

 

“Wait, wait,” Raleigh says after a minute or five. “What’s your name?”

 

“Mako,” the scientist says. Their arms are still around each other. “What’s yours?”

 

“Raleigh,” Raleigh says.

 

“Raleigh, you need to shave,” Mako says, rubbing his cheek with her palm.

 

Raleigh takes this as it’s meant, as a suggestion of more kisses to come, and can’t help laughing as Mako herself laughs into his neck. “Okay, Mako,” he says.

 

In the distance, he hears the call that lunch has ended. As they part, though, Mako says, “My room is in the temporary science block. Go in through the blue doors, it’s the third on the left.”

 

“Third on the left,” Raleigh says. They’re holding hands, still, until he has to run back out to make it to the wall in time.

 

It’s a miracle that Raleigh doesn’t fall at any point during the rest of the shift. He gets that the invitation wasn’t for sex specifically; he just wants to see her again, too. They’d be so Drift-compatible—he just knows it. Maybe it’s not that impossible after all, he thinks. If the Jaeger program does start up again, and Raleigh apologizes to Marshall Pentecost for allowing everyone to think he was dead, maybe he can show them how right Mako is and what a great pilot she’ll be.

 

When the shift’s finally over, Raleigh runs back to the showers to get the grime and sweat off before he goes to see Mako. After a moment of consideration, he also digs out his razor and ruins it by shaving off the beard, per her request. Now his face is the face of Raleigh Becket, the Jaeger pilot, again. He’s a little more weathered after five years, but there was a time when he was on magazine covers in every grocery store.

 

Raleigh puts on clean gear, pulls his coat around him, and makes for the science block, which is that kind of semi-shoddy building that’s supposed to be temporary but ends up being used as a permanent fixture. It’s a degree better than the six-guys-to-a-room construction worker shacks, but not a whole lot. But it’s Mako’s, so none of that matters.

 

It takes Mako a whole four seconds after she lets him into her room before she stares at him hard and says, “ _Becket_. You’re Raleigh Becket.” She doesn’t exactly sound angry, but he’s not sure.

 

“Yeah,” Raleigh says. “I’m sorry.” It’s not like he lied, but he wasn’t entirely truthful.

 

“The records say you died in Anchorage,” Mako says. She’s about to say something like, _with your brother_ , but she stops.

 

“Yeah,” Raleigh says again. “I was still in the Drift with my brother when—“ How can he explain it to someone who’s never Drifted?  “It was hard to deal with that,” he says. It's the best he can do. Then something strikes him about her phrasing. “Wait, ‘the records’?”

 

“I trained as a Ranger at the academy,” Mako says. “We studied all the Jaeger battles that occurred, including yours. I had almost finished my training when the Jaeger program was shut down.”

 

“So you _can_ pilot a Jaeger,” Raleigh says. He should have seen it; there’s the confidence in her body, the steeliness in her voice. Everything about her says it. She can fight monsters. And when she looks at him, she’s seeing all of his deployments, his statistics, even the data on Anchorage. With someone else, he might feel naked, but with Mako it’s okay. He wants her to know.

 

“51 drops, 51 kills in the simulator,” Mako says, with a glimmer of shyness, but also the amount of pride she deserves. “I’ve also created Jaeger designs.” She touches his shoulders. “And you are a pilot.” The way she says _you_ is the best thing in the world, because she says it like he’s important, like that _you_ means a lot to her.

 

The best part is, it’s not like she values him any more now than when she thought he was a guy who'd never touched a Jaeger. It’s just that they both understand things that so few people on the planet have experienced. Knowing the inside workings, the furnace hearts of machines that are humanity’s last cry against destruction. Seeing those numbers that describe and don’t describe what a kaiju, a nightmare, can do. Sharing a piece of your soul with a metal shell that might not be so empty after all.

 

Before today, if someone had told him he was a pilot, Raleigh would have said, “Not any more.” Today, though, they’re too busy kissing for him to talk. Even Yancy couldn’t mock him for this, though; Mako knows Jaegers, she’s the other half of him, she’s just right. She’s his co-pilot. And she’s holding on just as tight to him. He can’t stop smiling—neither can she—and that’s okay. Suddenly it feels like the apocalypse isn’t so inevitable after all. If she’s his co-pilot, maybe they can save the world.

 

Still to come is the moment when Raleigh tells Marshall Pentecost that he’s still alive, the moment when Pentecost tells the PPDC that they already have one pilot for the rescued Gipsy Danger, the moment when Mako and Raleigh leave the Wall for good. The moment when a Jaeger finally intervenes again, stopping a Category 4 kaiju before it can destroy Hong Kong.

 

But, for now, there’s hope.  


End file.
